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Memorials and Other Papers V1

T >> Thomas de Quincey >> Memorials and Other Papers V1




Neither must the reader suppose that, even in that day, I belonged to
the party who disparage the classical writers, or the classical
training of the great English schools. The Greek drama I loved and
revered. But, to deal frankly, because it is a subject which I shall
hereafter bring before the public, I made great distinctions. I was not
that indiscriminate admirer of Greek and Roman literature, which those
too generally are who admire it at all. This protesting spirit, against
a false and blind idolatry, was with me, at that time, a matter of
enthusiasm--almost of bigotry. I was a bigot against bigots. Let us
take the Greek oratory, for example:--What section of the Greek
literature is more fanatically exalted, and studiously in depreciation
of our own? Let us judge of the sincerity at the base of these hollow
affectations, by the downright facts and the producible records. To
admire, in any sense which can give weight and value to your
admiration, presupposes, I presume, some acquaintance with its object.
As the earliest title to an opinion, one way or other, of the Greek
eloquence, we ought to have studied some of its most distinguished
artists; or, say _one_, at least; and this one, we may be sure,
will be, as it ought to be, Demosthenes. Now, it is a fact, that all
the copies of Demosthenes sold within the last hundred years would not
meet the demand of one considerable town, were that orator a subject of
study amongst even classical scholars. I doubt whether, at this day,
there exist twenty men in Europe who can be said to have even once read
Demosthenes; and, therefore, it was that, when Mr. Mitford, in his
"History of Greece," took a new view of this orator's political
administration--a view which lowered his character for integrity--he
found an unresisting acceder to his doctrines in a public having no
previous opinion upon the subject, and, therefore, open to any casual
impression of malice or rash judgment. Had there been any acquaintance
with the large remains which we still possess of this famous orator, no
such wrong could have been done. I, from my childhood, had been a
reader, nay, a student of Demosthenes; and, simply, for this reason,
that, having meditated profoundly on the true laws and philosophy of
diction, and of what is vaguely denominated style, and finding nothing
of any value in modern writers upon this subject, and not much as
regards the grounds and ultimate principles even in the ancient
rhetoricians, I have been reduced to collect my opinions from the great
artists and practitioners, rather than from the theorists; and, among
those artists, in the most plastic of languages, I hold Demosthenes to
have been the greatest.

The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It was
a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the
material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger compass
of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator
imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One
step further in passion, and the orator would become a poet. An orator
can exhaust the capacities of a language--an historian, never.
Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of
highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That
generation had fixed and ascertained the use of words; whereas, the
previous generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c., was a
transitional period: the language was still moving, and tending to a
meridian not yet attained; and the public eye had been directed
consciously upon language, as in and for itself an organ of
intellectual delight, for too short a time, to have mastered the whole
art of managing its resources. All these were reasons for studying
Demosthenes, as the one great model and standard of Attic prose; and,
studied him I _had_, more than any other prose writer whatever.
_Paripassu_, I had become sensible that others had _not_ studied
him. One monotonous song of applause I found raised on every side;
something about being "like a torrent, that carries everything
before it." This original image is all we get in the shape of
criticism; and never any attempt even at illustrating what is greatest
in him, or characterizing what is most peculiar. The same persons who
discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon have also
complimented him with the title of the English Demosthenes. Upon this
hint, Lord Brougham, in his address to the Glasgow students, has
deluged the great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvious
prudence in lodging your praise upon an object from which you count
upon a rebound to yourself. But here, as everywhere else, you look in
vain for any marks or indications of a personal and _direct_
acquaintance with the original orations. The praise is built rather
upon the popular idea of Demosthenes, than upon the real Demosthenes.
And not only so, but even upon style itself, and upon the art of
composition _in abstracto_, Lord Brougham does not seem to have
formed any clear conceptions--principles he has none. Now, it is
useless to judge of an artist until you have some principles on the
art. The two capital secrets in the art of prose composition are these:
1st, The philosophy of transition and connection, or the art by which
one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another:
all fluent and effective composition depends on the _connections_;
--2dly, The way in which sentences are made to modify each other; for,
the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of
this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid
succession of sentences; and, because some limitation is necessary to
the length and complexity of sentences, in order to make this
interdependency felt, hence it is that the Germans have no eloquence.
The construction of German prose tends to such immoderate length of
sentences, that no effect of intermodification can ever be apparent.
Each sentence, stuffed with innumerable clauses of restriction, and
other parenthetical circumstances, becomes a separate section--an
independent whole. But, without insisting on Lord Brougham's
oversights, or errors of defect, I will digress a moment to one
positive caution of his, which will measure the value of his philosophy
on this subject. He lays it down for a rule of indefinite application,
that the Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favored at the
expense of that part which has so happily coalesced with the language
from the Latin or Greek. This fancy, often patronized by other writers,
and even acted upon, resembles that restraint which some metrical
writers have imposed upon themselves--of writing a long copy of verses,
from which some particular letter, or from each line of which some
different letter, should be carefully excluded. What followed? Was the
reader sensible, in the practical effect upon his ear, of any beauty
attained? By no means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in
the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had
been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in
Germany; and so much further is it carried, that one great puritan in
this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of
Adelung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin
and composition out of the language, by assigning some equivalent term
spun out from pure native Teutonic materials. _Bayonet_, for
example, is patriotically rejected, because a word may be readily
compounded tantamount to _musket-dirk_; and this sort of
composition thrives showily in the German, as a language running into
composition with a fusibility only surpassed by the Greek.

But what good purpose is attained by such caprices? In three sentences
the sum of the philosophy may be stated. It has been computed (see
_Duclos_) that the Italian opera has not above six hundred words
in its whole vocabulary: so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so
little are these emotions disposed to expand themselves into any
variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple,
household, homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry.
Their passion is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and deeper
than that of the opera, because more permanent and coextensive with
human life; but it is not much wider in its sphere, nor more apt to
coalesce with contemplative or philosophic thinking. Pass from these
narrow fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects are
so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, to the
immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which Shakspeare careers--co-
infinite with life itself--yes, and with something more than life. Here
is the other pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice of
diction? What is the _lexis_? Is it Saxon exclusively, or is it
Saxon by preference? So far from that, the Latinity is intense--not,
indeed, in his construction, but in his choice of words; and so
continually are these Latin words used, with a critical respect to
their earliest (and, where _that_ happens to have existed, to
their unfigurative) meaning, that, upon this one argument I would rely
for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to
Shakspeare's learning. Nay, I will affirm that, out of this regard to
the Latin acceptation of Latin words, may be absolutely explained the
Shakspearian meaning of certain words, which has hitherto baffled all
his critics. For instance, the word _modern_, of which Dr. Johnson
professes himself unable to explain the _rationale_ or principle
regulating its Shakspearian use, though he felt its value, it is to be
deduced thus: First of all, change the pronunciation a little, by
substituting for the short _o_, as we pronounce it in _modern_, the
long _o_, as heard in _modish_, and you will then, perhaps, perceive
the process of analogy by which it passed into the Shakspearian use.
The _matter_ or substance of a thing is, usually, so much more
important than its fashion or _manner_, that we have hence adopted, as
one way for expressing what is important as opposed to what is trivial,
the word _material_. Now, by parity of reason, we are entitled to
invert this order, and to express what is unimportant by some word
indicating the mere fashion or external manner of an object as opposed
to its substance. This is effected by the word _modal_ or _modern_, as
the adjective from _modus_, a fashion or manner; and in that sense
Shakspeare employs the word. Thus, Cleopatra, undervaluing to Caesar's
agent the bijouterie which she has kept back from inventory, and which
her treacherous steward had betrayed, describes them as mere trifles


"Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal;"


where all commentators have _felt_ that modern must form the
position, mean, slight, arid inconsiderable, though perplexed to say
how it came by such a meaning. A _modern_ friend is, in the
Shakspearian sense, with relation to a real and serviceable friend,
that which the fashion of a thing is, by comparison with its substance.
But a still better illustration may be taken from a common line, quoted
every day, and ludicrously misinterpreted. In the famous picture of
life--"All the world's a stage"--the justice of the piece is described
as

"Full of wise saws and modern instances;"

which (_horrendum dictu!_) has been explained, and, I verily
believe, is generally understood to mean, _full of wise sayings and
modern illustrations_. The true meaning is--full of proverbial
maxims of conduct and of trivial arguments; that is, of petty
distinctions, or verbal disputes, such as never touch the point at
issue. The word _modern_ I have already deduced; the word
_instances_ is equally Latin, and equally used by Shakspeare in
its Latin sense. It is originally the word _instantia_, which, by
the monkish and scholastic writers, is uniformly used in the sense of
an argument, and originally of an argument urged in objection to some
previous argument. [Footnote: I cannot for a moment believe that the
original and most eloquent critic in _Blackwood_ is himself the
dupe of an argument, which he has alleged against this passage, under
too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction
to common sense, by representing _all_ human beings of such an age
as school-boys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another as
magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is this
that whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that
profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which
seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or
predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and
animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth,
next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their
most unlimited range; and because that is obviously the military
profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the
representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the
peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as
supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also
soldiers; but that the military profession, so far from strengthening,
moderates and tempers the characteristic temper of old age.]

I affirm, therefore, that Lord Brougham's counsel to the Glasgow
students is not only bad counsel,--and bad counsel for the result, as
well as for the grounds, which are either capricious or nugatory,--but
also that, in the exact proportion in which the range of thought
expands, it is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel--a
counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the mind in
fetters, where even its utmost freedom and its largest resources will
be found all too little for the growing necessities of the intellect.
"Long-tailed words in _osity_ and _ation_!" What does _that_
describe? Exactly the Latin part of our language. Now, those
very terminations speak for themselves:--All high abstractions
end in _ation_; that is, they are Latin; and, just in proportion
as the abstracting power extends and widens, do the circles of thought
widen, and the horizon or boundary (contradicting its own Grecian name)
melts into the infinite. On this account it was that Coleridge
(_Biographia Literaria_) remarks on Wordsworth's philosophical
poetry, that, in proportion as it goes into the profound of passion and
of thought, do the words increase which are vulgarly called
"_dictionary_ words." Now, these words, these "dictionary" words,
what are they? Simply words of Latin or Greek origin: no other words,
no Saxon words, are ever called by illiterate persons dictionary words.
And these dictionary words are indispensable to a writer, not only in
the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to extent and as
to subtility of thinking, but also as to elevation and sublimity.
Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was;
for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those
of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things
within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the law of his
intellect--he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely from this quality
of grandeur, unapproachable grandeur, his intellect demanded a larger
infusion of Latinity into his diction.

For the same reason (and, without such aids, he would have had no
proper element in which to move his wings) he enriched his diction with
Hellenisms and with Hebraisms; [Footnote: The diction of Milton is a
case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said,
but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The
value must be tried by the result, not by inferences from _a
priori_ principles; such inferences might lead us to anticipate an
unfortunate result; whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such
that no other could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The
final result is a _transcendant_ answer to all adverse criticism;
but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified has
undertaken the examination of the Miltonic diction as a separate
problem. Listen to a popular author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He,
speaking on this subject, asserts (_England and the English_, p.
329), that, "_There is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not
violated, or a foreign one which he has not borrowed._" Now, in
answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say that the
two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom throughout
Milton:--1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpine from Jove;" and, in this case,
the same thing might be urged in apology which Aristotle urges in
another argument, namely, that _anonymon to pathos_, the case is
unprovided with _any_ suitable expression. How would it be
possible to convey in good English the circumstances here indicated--
namely, that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, when she
had borne no daughter to Jove? Second, I will cite a case which, so far
as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, probably,
because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the
"Paradise Regained;" but where I do not at this moment remember. "Will
they _transact_ with God?" This is the passage; and a most flagrant
instance it offers of pure Latinism. _Transigere_, in the language
of the civil law, means to make a compromise; and the word
_transact_ is here used in that sense--a sense utterly unknown to
the English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not
know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted
whether Milton is not defensible; asking if they proposed to terminate
their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of
law, he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the
technical term which designated them. Thus, might a divine say: Will he
arrest the judgments of God by a _demurrer_? Thus, again, Hamlet
apostrophizes the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions
for assault, &c. Besides, what proper term is there in English for
expressing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors,
express the idea by the word _temperament_; but that word, though
a good one, was at one time considered an exotic term--equally a
Gallicism and a Latinism.] but never, as could be easy to show, without
a full justification in the result. Two things may be asserted of all
his exotic idioms--1st, That they express what could not have been
expressed by any native idiom; 2d, That they harmonize with the English
language, and give a coloring of the antique, but not any sense of
strangeness to the diction. Thus, in the double negative, "Nor did they
not perceive," &c., which is classed as a Hebraism--if any man fancy
that it expresses no more than the simple affirmative, he shows that he
does not understand its force; and, at the same time, it is a form of
thought so natural and universal, that I have heard English people,
under corresponding circumstances, spontaneously fall into it. In
short, whether a man differ from others by greater profundity or by
greater sublimity, and whether he write as a poet or as a philosopher,
in any case, he feels, in due proportion to the necessities of his
intellect, an increasing dependence upon the Latin section of the
English language; and the true reason why Lord Brougham failed to
perceive this, or found the Saxon equal to his wants, is one which I
shall not scruple to assign, inasmuch as it does not reflect personally
on Lord Brougham, or, at least, on him exclusively, but on the whole
body to which he belongs. That thing which he and they call by the
pompous name of statesmanship, but which is, in fact, _statescraft_--
the art of political intrigue--deals (like the opera) with ideas so few
in number, and so little adapted to associate themselves with other
ideas, that, possibly, in the one case equally as in the other, six
hundred words are sufficient to meet all their demands.

I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from
Demosthenes to another subject, no otherwise connected with the Attic
orator than, first, by the common reference of both subjects to
rhetoric; but, secondly, by the accident of having been jointly
discussed by Lord Brougham in a paper, which (though now forgotten)
obtained, at the moment, most undue celebrity. For it is one of the
infirmities of the public mind with us, that whatever is said or done
by a public man, any opinion given by a member of Parliament, however
much out of his own proper jurisdiction and range of inquiry, commands
an attention not conceded even to those who speak under the known
privilege of professional knowledge. Thus, Cowper was not discovered to
be a poet worthy of any general notice, until Charles Fox, a most
slender critic, had vouchsafed to quote a few lines, and that, not so
much with a view to the poetry, as to its party application. But now,
returning to Demosthenes, I affirm that his case is the case of nearly
all the classical writers,--at least, of all the prose writers. It is,
I admit, an extreme one; that is, it is the general case in a more
intense degree. Raised almost to divine honors, never mentioned but
with affected rapture, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read,
most of them never; are they, indeed, the closet companions of any man?
Surely it is time that these follies were at an end; that our practice
were made to square a little better with our professions; and that our
pleasures were sincerely drawn from those sources in which we pretend
that they lie.

The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, is the very rarest
of all accomplishments, and precisely because it is unspeakably the
most difficult. Let not the reader dupe himself by popular cant. To be
an accomplished Grecian, demands a very peculiar quality of talent; and
it is almost inevitable that one who is such should be vain of a
distinction which represents so much labor and difficulty overcome. For
myself, having, as a school-boy, attained to a very unusual mastery
over this language, and (though as yet little familiar with the
elaborate science of Greek metre) moving through all the obstacles and
resistances of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through
those of the French and Latin, I had, in vanquishing the difficulties
of the language, lost the main stimulus to its cultivation. Still, I
read Greek daily; but any slight vanity which I might connect with a
power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so
readily transmutes itself into a disproportionate admiration of the
author, in me was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken
of my entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature. With
what fury would I often exclaim: He who loveth not his brother whom he
hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L,
M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities
which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can
you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful
sublimities of the classical poetry--with the nod of the Olympian Jove,
or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most
prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is
justly held to be a great merit; but it is hardly a qualification for a
Pantheon. The parting of Hector and Andromache--that is tender,
doubtless; but how many passages of far deeper, far diviner tenderness,
are to be found in Chaucer! Yet in these cases we give our antagonist
the benefit of an appeal to what is really best and most effective in
the ancient literature. For, if we should go to Pindar, and some other
great names, what a revelation of hypocrisy as respects the _fade_
enthusiasts for the Greek poetry!

Still, in the Greek tragedy, however otherwise embittered against
ancient literature by the dismal affectations current in the scenical
poetry, at least I felt the presence of a great and original power. It
might be a power inferior, upon the whole, to that which presides in
the English tragedy; I believed that it was; but it was equally
genuine, and appealed equally to real and deep sensibilities in our
nature. Yet, also, I felt that the two powers at work in the two forms
of the drama were essentially different; and without having read a line
of German at that time, or knowing of any such controversy, I began to
meditate on the elementary grounds of difference between the Pagan and
the Christian forms of poetry. The dispute has since been carried on
extensively in France, not less than in Germany, as between the
_classical_ and the _romantic_. But I will venture to assert
that not one step in advance has been made, up to this day. The shape
into which I threw the question it may be well to state; because I am
persuaded that out of that one idea, properly pursued, might be evolved
the whole separate characteristics of the Christian and the antique:
Why is it, I asked, that the Christian idea of _sin_ is an idea
utterly unknown to the Pagan mind? The Greeks and Romans had a clear
conception of a moral ideal, as we have; but this they estimated by a
reference to the will; and they called it virtue, and the antithesis
they called vice. The _lacheté_ or relaxed energy of the will, by
which it yielded to the seductions of sensual pleasure, that was vice;
and the braced-up tone by which it resisted these seductions was
virtue. But the idea of holiness, and the antithetic idea of sin, as a
violation of this awful and unimaginable sanctity, was so utterly
undeveloped in the Pagan mind, that no word exists in classical Greek
or classical Latin which approaches either pole of this synthesis;
neither the idea of _holiness_, nor of its correlate, _sin_,
could be so expressed in Latin as at once to satisfy Cicero and a
scientific Christian. Again (but this was some years after), I found
Schiller and Goethe applauding the better taste of the ancients, in
symbolizing the idea of death by a beautiful youth, with a torch
inverted, &c., as compared with the Christian types of a skeleton and
hour-glasses, &c. And much surprised I was to hear Mr. Coleridge
approving of this German sentiment. Yet, here again I felt the peculiar
genius of Christianity was covertly at work moving upon a different
road, and under opposite ideas, to a just result, in which the harsh
and austere expression yet pointed to a dark reality, whilst the
beautiful Greek adumbration was, in fact, a veil and a disguise. The
corruptions and the other "dishonors" of the grave, and whatsoever
composes the sting of death in the Christian view, is traced up to sin
as its ultimate cause. Hence, besides the expression of Christian
humility, in thus nakedly exhibiting the wrecks and ruins made by sin,
there is also a latent profession indicated of Christian hope. For the
Christian contemplates steadfastly, though with trembling awe, the
lowest point of his descent; since, for him, that point, the last of
his fall, is also the first of his reäscent, and serves, besides, as an
exponent of its infinity; the infinite depth becoming, in the rebound,
a measure of the infinite reäscent. Whereas, on the contrary, with the
gloomy uncertainties of a Pagan on the question of his final
restoration, and also (which must not be overlooked) with his utter
perplexity as to the nature of his restoration, if any were by accident
in reserve, whether in a condition tending downwards or upwards, it was
the natural resource to consult the general feeling of anxiety and
distrust, by throwing a thick curtain and a veil of beauty over the
whole too painful subject. To place the horrors in high relief, could
here have answered no purpose but that of wanton cruelty; whereas, with
the Christian hopes, the very saddest memorials of the havocs made by
death are antagonist prefigurations of great victories in the rear.

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